Fujirockers: The official Fuji Rock Festival blog

Big Audio Dynamite Bringing Old School Bangers!

Do festivals have theme songs?  Nailing down one band, let alone one song seems like an impossible task, but for for what it’s worth, (you can add your own nominees in the comments section) I would have to choose Big Audio Dynamite’s mid 80’s banger, “E=Mc2.”

Besides an impossibly upbeat rhythm led by  former Clash guitarist, Mick Jones, the song also features the lyrical chanting or “toasting” of Don Letts, the DJ who almost singlehandedly introduced reggae and dub to the UK.

Fuji Rock’s fascination with The Clash is well known (click here) allowing B.A.D. to draw a sizable crowd at the White Stage with many  singing along to hits such as “Medicine Show” and “The Bottom Line,” need I mention, “C’mon Every Beatbox.”

The question is,  how does this  song hold up live? B.A.D. have taken a 20 year break and they face tough competition for festival theme songs. Coldplay will certainly tear at heart strings with “The Scientist” and Wu Lyf’s  ”Heavy Pop” is unbeatable when it comes to early afternoon bombast.  And need we mention  Arctic Monkeys? They seem to make  anything sound good.

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I started listening to Ian Brown outside the White Lodge, your fujirock.com hq, just up from the White Stage. It sent a shiver down my spine. That’s some milk curdling voice he has going on here. I went inside, and things didn’t get any better… Eventually I bit the bullet and down I went, to get in amongst.

I was regretting the decision to choose this over Air at the Red. But once in situ, the cacophony of sound works with Brown to, err, drown out, err, tone down his voice. Things become much more listenable once here. Continue Reading…

There are two nationalities that are the winners in the drawcrowd stakes here at FRF. The first is the Brits. It was fellow FRFer Jeff who put it so succinctly when he said if you laid a turd on toast, put it on stage and called it British, people would come to see it.

The second is, unsurprisingly, the Japanese. No matter who they are, regardless of if they’re any good, a local band will always draw a respectable crowd. So it is at White right now, as Straightener show me just why they have as big a group here as One Day As A Lion will later this evening. I expect local rockin faves The Cro-Magnons will draw a bigger crowd still. Continue Reading…

Grapevine on White stage

I don’t know much about Grapevine, the Japanese band that took to the White stage here at Fuji Rock around 1pm. My J-team colleagues advise me that they’ve been around for about ten years so it wasn’t much of a surprise to see the stage area packed with people there to rock out with them.

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Well I think that we can still say that Disco-Punk is still hot and DFA is still cool, but it doesn’t mean anything to James Murphy. “I spent my whole life wanting to be cool… but I’ve come to realize that coolness doesn’t exist the way I once assumed,” he said. And now we know that LCD Soundsystem show us something in their new album This Is Happening, but I still highly recommend you check the lyrics of the single You Wanted A Hit. It’s crystal clear.

還記得DFA這個紐約廠牌在Disco-Punk潮翻天時，是如何地具有指標性，我相信差不多是現在Ed Banger這種等級，The Rapture的那曲House of Jealous Lovers至今也是歷久不衰（對我而言吧），而廠牌老闆James Murphy與其一人化身的LCD Soundsystem，在紐約Disco-Punk / Post-Punk圈中的影響力到現在都還舉足輕重； Continue Reading…

Special Others

The term “post rock” is a slippery one, prone to ponderous postulation and pigeonholing.  Post-rock seems to state that its practitioners have tired of traditional rock n’ roll tropes and decided to move on, noodling through music without regard for traditional song structures. The Yokohama-based quartet Special Others certainly fit certain criteria to be included in this camp: they’re instrumental; they rarely reach the squealing guitar crescendo of a rock gig; and they jam like a jazz band covering the indie rock catalog. Well, to be honest, they’re constructed more like a jazz band than anything else, with an upright bass and organ playing prominent roles.

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Belle & Sebastian

It’s been a while to hear from our Glaswegian friends in Belle & Sebastian: their last album came out four years ago and touring has been limited since. But with a new album and global tour in the works, it appears that the hills of Naeba will be alive with twee, indie pop (Twindypop? Oh I am so coining that word right now).

In other news, the band is reuniting with its origins in the form of curating All Tomorrow’s Parties in December, a festival that was inspired by their own “Bowlie Weekender” event in 1999. Then there’s “God Help the Girl” an upcoming movie and soundtrack put together by B&S frontman, Stuart Murdoch (interview here). And now after a four-year hiatus (kinda), the band’s back and on the road.

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The Cro Magnons

For those of you arriving to Japan and the Fuji Rock Festival this year from outside the country, the plethora of choices for Japanese bands can be overwhelming, if not downright intimidating. All those kanji and kana band names looking like squiggles and doodles don’t tell you diddly. Well never fear. The kind people here at Fujirock.com can help point you to some great Japanese artists that just might be in your strike zone.  Shawn has already touched on Ogre You Asshole, Coglione on Straightener, and there will be plenty more coming down the stretch。You can also access our shifty search button in the top right for past posts on Japanese bands you may not know of.  [ED: We should supply a link for that]

I’m gonna start off with an easy one for those who like some straight ahead, stage breakin’, converse high top wearin’, three chord playin’, up and down jumpin’ rock: The Cro Magnons (ザ・クロマニヨンズ). And they certainly won’t be hard to find at the fest. Continue Reading…

The Bloodthirsty Butchers sound check was the loudest thing I have ever heard when the band played in Taiwan in 2008. And for a band that overtly models themselves in the likeness of My Bloody Valentine, dare I say they they were louder?

I witnessed My Bloody Valentine’s set at Fuji Rock the same year when they went into the 20-minute feedback storm for the song “You Made Me Realize.” That was pretty loud, but not in a painful, off putting way. But as a testament to these powerful sound waves, the  fabric on my trousers did begin to flap. A recap of this concert is here.

But where the Bloodthirsty Butchers have them beat is they b-r-i-n-g it every time, with each song being a sonic blast, from the beginning of the show to the end. Also, their sound is not a simple pop melody obfuscated by fuzzy guitars but something more ferocious and experimental.

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Ian Brown

I smoked a joint with Ian Brown once. If my mum or members of the constabulary are reading this, I totally made that up. If not, it’s completely true.
It was around the time that he was launching his solo career. It was 1997 or maybe 1998 and Unfinished Monkey Business hadn’t arrived yet, but we’d heard it was coming. He was playing a charity gig at a club in London where I worked. Also on the bill was Jarvis Cocker and it wasn’t hard to see who the crowd favorite was: the gangly Sheffield girlyman was flavor of the year in Britain back then, and the people were more interested to stare at him Djing than to pay much attention to Brown. Continue Reading…

MGMT

In “Kids” and “Time To Pretend” (2008)  MGMT may have had two of the best indie rock dance singles since the genre coalesced out of the collective consciousness of the yungins (thank God they didn’t invent a music style I hated, I might start feeling old), but since then they seem to be more bent on confounding expectations than endlessly repeated attempts at creating celebratory fellow-feeling. Actively eschewing the fame the club singles have brought them, their new album, Congratulations (2010), has been, shall we say, polarizing. Continue Reading…

Jaga Jazzist

Summer Sonic has A-ha, Fuji Rock has Jaga Jazzist. It’s enough to give a Norweigan wood.
Fuji Rock’s Norweigans claim on their website that they “have in one way or another contributed to almost every significant recording to come out of that part of the world (Norway) in the last few years”, which we should take as a huge diss to A-ha’s “Foot of the Mountain” LP.
But the Ninja Tune artists are certainly the best thing to come out of Vikingland except for Röyksopp and possibly the Kings of Convenience. Feel free to list in the comments all the great Norwegian acts I’m ignoring.
People compare Jaga Jazzist to Soft Machine, but that’s a bit unfair. They’re much jazzier, not nearly as indulgent and they have more than twice as many members. This nine-piece incorporates the trombone, bass, tuba and vibraphone among many other instruments.
Jaga Jazzist have been lined up for late afternoon on the White Stage, which ordinarily might be a tough spot for them, but it looks like Smash are going for a gentle Friday afternoon there, and with The Cribs and Ogre You Asshole looking like they’ll fill similar spots on other major stages, this will be the chill-out field.

Broken Social Scene 2006

It’s been a few years since Broken Social Scene has played at Fuji Rock Festival (they were last here in 2006). It’s nice to have some solid representation from the The Great White North and so early in the lineup announcements. Continue Reading…

Despite the rain, there were no shortage of Fujirockers on opening day of the 2009 festival. Here is the White Stage crowd for Chara at about 4:45pm, Friday, July 24.